hrough the prophets, and they had reason to believe that God would do the very same thing for them through the Holy Spirit in the era after Christ's ascension. It should come as no surprise then that a whole host of writings being held by the early Church as being inspired by God appeared on the scene in the next decades. The recognition of specific writings as being divinely inspired Scripture to be included in the canon of the New Testament came almost immediately in the first century. In the first half of the second century, the four Gospels and Pauls writings were already deemed worthy of canonical status by the church. The canonization of the rest of the books we have now come to know as the New Testament took place over the first few centuries of the early Church through a gradual process. The first account we have of the collection that is now included in the New Testament canon is in a letter written about forty years after the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. The criteria and the formation of the New Testament was different from that of the Old Testament. Each collection of writings came to be recognized as divinely inspired over a large period of time. Although there was not a specific council that declared the New Testament as authoritative, there are many pieces of evidence for the New Testament to suggest that it is the word of God. The specific criteria that was used in determining the exact collection of the New Testament included the issues of apostolicity, orthodoxy, antiquity, inspiration, and church usage to decide canonical status. The criteria of apostolicity, G. W. H. Lampe explains in a carefully written essay that the churchs most readily available weapon against the Gnostic Christians and the other heretics was its apostolicity, which was guaranteed by historical succession and preserved in oral and written traditions. It has also been argued that the intrinsic apostolic authority of the the writing...
